Dubrovnik, Korcula, Croatia...Five Days

Five days in and around Dubrovnik, Croatia. In our shipboard Croatia guide, passed out 2-3 days before arrival at a port, there a seriously truncated section on cultural and political history, likely a significant omission. I’ve been trying to understand the last 25 years of the former Yugoslavia’s history for almost that long…warring religious, ethnic and nationalist groups, an embattled people in a spectacularly beautiful mountainous land, little or no industry besides tourism, which in the port city of Dubrovnik brings in 550 cruise ships in the summer and almost none after October. In a class exercise, where I asked students to write a phrase that captured the essence of the culture they had just visited, I wrote about Dubrovnik “an opulent, dramatic geography along the Adriac Sea with deep currents of human turmoil—anger, depression, sadness, fear – the fuse for more violence?”

The recent history is easy to recite: after the fall of Tito’s socialist state in the 1980’s, which many locals told us was good for Croatian life, just and economically sound, the Republic of Croatia proclaimed its independence. In October 1991, after Croatia sought its independence, Serbia attacked Croatia with tanks, war ships and guns. The Croats were mostly defenseless, lost 43 citizens, and sustained extensive damage. Given the severe power of the Serbs and the Montenegrins, who intended to burn and destroy the territory completely, perhaps partly to gain access to the Sea, the gorgeous city of Dubrovnik was hit hard and the city itself was in the enemy’s total encirclement for eight months. Much of that time, Croats had no food or water, no power, while the UN tried to intervene. The scars are still deep, as we heard, unsolicited, from four or five native Croats and even some Serbs, who live in Croatia. Imagine: you’re a Serb living in Croatia while your brother is in the mountains or at sea shelling your home.

We were warned by our shipboard interport scholars and students, Don’t raise the topic of the war. But we couldn’t avoid it: one of our tour guides entertained us with a three hour rant, mostly about the current corrupt government, holdovers from socialist days, the priesthood in cahoots with the government, and the economic and human cost to his own life of the war.

We roamed the rocky coastline and the Old City a lot, went on a splendid service visit to the main Orphanage and the Dubrovnik City Hospital. We were able to meet director and many of the teachers, as well as the children, at the orphanage. Had a great seafood dinner at Lokande restaurant.